Nix flake

[netbrain]

Would be nice to have a nix flake that could build several variants of Zwift.

• A variant that would build a container as today
• A variant that would build a minimal container that uses a volume for Zwift and on first run it will simply start the Zwift download silently
• A variant that would install wine binary and install Zwift and it's dependencies and launch Zwift on host machine instead of a container
• A variant that would compile wine (statically if possible) and launch Zwift on host instead of container

Could then have a GitHub action with matrices build that would compile/install wine for different architectures, both for containers but also native builds.

[netbrain]

I'm slowly learning nix, so not sure if all is possible, but it would be great if anyone with nix experience could help in this matter.

[netbrain]

quietvoid/runfromprocess-rs#1

[relief-melone]

I just added some edits to the flake to make zwift configurable. I think it would be great though if we could build a package that does not use a docker container as well. Might give it a go if I find the time. Question would be if it should go here though or directly to nixpkgs.
While I am starting to get the hang of NixOS I am still lacking a deep knowledge of wine. Where would I find the settings you made to wine to make zwift run this well? I tried before making zwift run in heroic and failed miserably :D

[netbrain]

That's great, ill take a look at it thanks!"

I concur, it would be great if we could leverage the nix package system to create several versions of the zwift build, just as i mentioned in the checkbox list up above. Whereas the two last points would be a host only install, and the two first, would be container builds.

The difficult part to this is that nix packages likes to lock things down, i.e no network connectivity within builds. So it makes it challenging to actually create the zwift build, but with enough vigor one should be able to work around this by i.e pre-downloading all the zwift assets beforehand.

As to your question regarding wine, the first you need to look at is the entrypoint

This prepares the container runtime to run zwift, and then depending if it's the first time it runs this container or it detects zwift from a previous run it will either execute run_zwift or update_zwift

Whereas update_zwift contains all the magic in getting the install to work on wine. i.e

[relief-melone]

If the build outcome is the same all the time we could use the network connection. You can set the output hash on a derivation. So as long as the resulting content of the build does not change you can use the network connection.
It still is a challenge because you need to make sure the things you access do not change over time or the build will start to fail as the output hash will mismatch.
I'll take a look at the files mentioned. Also still getting into nixos so this will be a nice project to learn and getting a well running zwift instance on Linux from it is a nice bonus 😀

[netbrain]

Great stuff, id like to help in any way i can, so don't be afraid to ping me if you have a branch your working on. I do have some nix knowledge myself, but haven't ventured far into creating my own packages. I have however created https://github.com/netbrain/npm-package

[relief-melone]

I guess in that case you're already further in then I am. I still think documentation is nixos biggest weakness. There's a lot to find but it's just scattered all over the place. Don't want to hate though. I get that it is a huge challenge to write a documentation that covers all and is accessible. I think it would help the adoption a lot though. Definitely stopped my distro hopping.